Wellbeing and happiness

William Davies’s recent (2015) book, The happiness industry: how the government and big business sold us well-being, provides a warning of the risks associated with the acceleration of interest in the promotion of happiness. It views the happiness agenda as an attempt to solve the problems that capitalism has created through approaches that end up ‘blaming – and medicating – individuals for their own misery’ and ignoring the context that created them. Psychological approaches are seen as being used by governments to avoid ‘looking in the mirror’ and confronting the serious political and economic questions that face societies. In short, the happiness agenda is employed as a deliberate strategy by governments and big business to distract from a focus on the real causes of disempowerment, stress and depression.

There is much of value in Davies’s critique of the relationship between modern capitalism and its effects on happiness. He identifies a ‘plague of materialism, which undermines our connectedness, leaving many of us isolated and lonely’ and highlights how unhappiness and depression are more concentrated in unequal societies with strongly materialist values. He also shows how workplaces increasingly put an emphasis on community and psychological commitment, albeit in the context of ‘longer-term economic trends towards atomization and insecurity’. In this sense, he argues, we have an economic model ‘which mitigates against precisely the psychological attributes it depends upon’. It’s difficult to take issue with these core arguments.

The problem with the book is what is left unsaid. At the root of this problem is his focus on a particular conception of wellbeing – individual happiness – while often using the terms happiness and wellbeing interchangeably. In blurring this distinction, he largely ignores conceptions of wellbeing that incorporate analysis of the effects of the wider political economy and treat individual happiness as only one indicator among many of ‘what matters’.

A recent conference in Sheffield brought together academics from a range of disciplines (including politics, philosophy, law, and economics), policy-makers, think-tanks and third sector organisations to discuss the politics of wellbeing. It heard many critical voices on how wellbeing has been constructed and employed in different contexts. The conference reflected an ongoing debate on the distinction between narrower conceptions of wellbeing that draw on utilitarian notions of individual happiness (or subjective wellbeing), on the one hand, and broader conceptions that emphasises the centrality of the relationship between individuals and their social contexts, on the other. Within this debate there is often recognition of the limitations of a focus on individual happiness alone, but also appreciation that people’s subjective evaluations of their lives have value. For most, such evaluations should have a role in shaping policy: but only alongside a range of other indicators.

We do not have to look beyond government to find evidence of this wider view of wellbeing. Take, for example, the UK government’s own wellbeing framework, developed by the Office for National Statistics. This identifies ten important domains of wellbeing, including health, work, education and income. In this framework, personal wellbeing is just one of these domains and only one indicator in this domain relates directly to individual happiness. Internationally, the OECD’s Better Life Index has a similar range of domains, with ‘life satisfaction’ alongside seven others, including housing, income jobs and so on. No-one is suggesting that these frameworks are perfect, but they do acknowledge wider processes as important and do not reduce the policy agenda to one of individual responsibility.